I think were back in the golden err of B/W photography myself.....A little history: from the 70's when we shot a couple or three bricks of Tri-X a month and a couple rolls of E-6 film for the three or so times a year the newspaper ran color on the section fronts. Now in the 80's with new presses and more color we shot more E-6 film (alot of Fuji400). We didn't get to crop our pics in color and the art directors loved looking at whole frame on the light table in color and they cropped....so out with my favorite lens...the Nikon 180 2.8 and bought a 80-200 2.8 zoom to do some better cropping in camera, since the use of enlargers were not used by the photographers in color, just B/W.... color printers and editors were more in the work flow. Now the early 90's color negative film took over or both B/W and color in the papers...and scanning the film for either B/W or Color use. The photographer didn't get to crop so much as the editors did from little fax copies with red lines marking the size. 1996 was the switch to digital, (AP's Nikon NC2000) and many painful years later and we now have a deceit bunch of digital camera for color and very good B/W software (Nik Silver Efex Pro 2) that brings back the look and feel of the darkroom again without a wastebasket full of $$$ paper. I really enjoy B/W again and cropping if I like without waste......Printing it is another story.

In some ways, Saturday's essay "Why Would a Digital Camera Have a B&W-only Sensor?" is one of the worst things I ever wrote. I struggle to try to express ideas clearly, but even as I was writing that one I already knew, in advance—before I had read one word of response—that too many people were ...